All I Ever Wanted
by Princess Yue
Summary: There's one thing in Aang's life that he's always wanted. He just never thought it would be so painful when he finally got it.


This story has been more work than it's worth. was down last night and I saved the document in the wrong place and was about to retype it when I found it some random folder I didn't even know existed. Anyway, this story has been a long time in the making - I've had the idea for a long time but never got around to actually writing it. It's basically just a little something on my thoughts about Zutara.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender (but I wish those who DID own it would tell us when season three is coming!).

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He wasn't the least bit surprised when the sound of stockinged feet padding softly along the bare, wooden panels of the floor reached his acute ears just before the gentle knock on his door reverberated throughout the vacant room in which he sat, alone in semi-darkness.

"Go away."

He knew exactly who was standing solicitously on the other side of the door, and she was the last person he wanted to speak with.

"Aang, don't be like that."

Katara took no heed of the menacing growl in his tone, having no desire to acquiesce to his request, and slowly cracked his door open. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she peered around and located him sitting on the floor with his back turned.

"Just listen to me."

Aang had no inclination at all to listen to her. He felt as though his whole world had been flipped upside down and was now spinning out of control, leaving him hanging on by a mere thread. A nauseous sensation was churning throughout his stomach and an indefinable weight had settled over his chest, gripping his heart in the most painfully tight grasp he had yet to experience.

"Please Aang, let me explain."

Explain? Explain? How could she possible explain? There was nothing to explain, nothing to vindicate; everything was now plain as day, all of the miniscule pieces of the puzzle neatly assembled, and he understood all that there was to understand and a whole lot more than he had ever wanted.

"There's nothing more to say, Katara."

Katara started, having grown accustomed to his stony silence, and was shocked to hear how detached and hollow his voice sounded, eerily devoid of any emotion.

She didn't reply immediately; Aang could hear her move briskly over to the window and draw back the shades, brightening the gloomy room with the moon's quiescent glow. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her elongated shadow take a few uncertain steps nearer until she was directly behind him, where she hesitated for a few seconds before reaching out to place her hand on his shoulder. He recoiled and retreated into a corner of the room, shying away from her touch. If she touched him he felt sure the cold, hardened resolve he had worked so hard to build in order to save himself from feeling the full extent of the pain and turmoil inside of him would shatter like glass into a million irreplaceable shards and he would be completely exposed to the harsh reality of what had happened.

"Don't be like this," she repeated morosely.

"Don't be like what, exactly?" Aang snapped in harsh tones.

Katara flinched. "This," she whispered despairingly. "Don't do this to me and to yourself."

How could he not? It had been the biggest shock of his life; it had come as even more of a horrifying surprise than the day he found out he had been frozen in an iceberg for one hundred years. Zuko had proposed to her – he had actually proposed to her, and in front of everyone present at the ceremony, too!

The proposal had sent Aang into a traumatized stupor; he was in a state of numb disbelief. Katara had never told him that there was anything, _anything_ going on between her and Zuko, and he had never picked up on any of the numerous hints floating around. After all that time, he had never noticed the way they often talked and flirted together, nor had it caught his attention that they had begun spending an increasing amount of time together and would disappear for hours at a time. The young Avatar felt sick now, imaging the possibilities of what they could have been doing during all that time they were gone. He had always thought of it as a friendship type thing, had even been happy for their spending quality time with one another – after all, they were setting their differences and old enmity towards each other aside to form a friendly bond. How wrong he was.

"Aang, I know how much this news has shocked you, and I regret not telling you about my relationship with Zuko earlier. I'm sorry I kept this secret from you and everybody else, but… but it was for the best."

Aang shook his head, his lips sealed tightly together, unable to respond. He had never felt so betrayed. Katara heaved an enormous sigh, giving Aang the impression she was about to talk about something she was extremely reluctant to discuss.

"Look Aang, I know what I said before the battle hurt you, but it was honest. It just wasn't how I felt at the time. After that, you started acting differently around me – cold and detached, and although you pretended nothing had changed between us, saying that you respected my decision and we could still easily be friends, our relationship wasn't the same again, and I could feel it. And so I got involved with Zuko, and he turned out to be a wonderful person after he was finally able to let go of his past and work through his problems and inner turmoil with… with my assistance. We grew so close and formed such a strong bond that I thought… I thought…" her voice faltered and broke, leaving a tense silence in their wake.

"You thought what, Katara?" asked Aang bitterly from his corner.

"I thought I was in love," she whispered.

Aang said nothing. He had tried so hard to get Katara to love him. Her love was the one thing he wanted and needed in his life; it was the one thing he had worked tirelessly, endlessly to achieve. She was the one he had given his heart to, and she ignored it and gave hers to another – another who, incidentally, had been the enemy she had fought against for longer than she had recognized him as a friend, for longer than she had been "in love" with him.

"You thought you were in love," he echoed tonelessly. He felt a prickling sensation in the inner corners of his eyes and he blinked. "It hurts, Katara."

"I know Aang, I know," Katara murmured, sinking gracefully to her knees and resting her hand on his arm.

"No, you don't know," he said angrily, jerking his arm away and shrinking farther away from her, wrapping his arms around his legs as he curled up as close to the corner as he could get. He wanted to stay angry at her, he wanted to hate her forever because it was the only thing he could do to prevent himself from coming to the harsh realization of everything that had happened, but he was finding the task to be getting more difficult by the second.

"You don't know what it's like to love someone so much that you would do anything in the world for that person and willingly put that person before yourself at any time. You don't know what it's like when your life revolves solely around one person, when your own happiness depends on theirs. You have no clue how it feels, how much it hurts, to have your heart torn into shreds and how it feels to have an enormous weight incessantly pressing down on your chest. You just – you don't know, you don't know how it tortures you, how it feels like you'll never be the same again, never be happy. All those nights I spent awake thinking about you, brooding on you…"

"Aang…"

"I love you so much, Katara," he choked, trying to swallow the large lump rising in his throat. "So much that I can't bear to live my life without you. Now I understand that I should have listened to the Guru – I should have given you up when I had the chance, before I loved you so much that it escalated to this situation where I can't do anything to control it. He was right – nothing good comes out of earthly attachments, and I understand that now. If only I had listened back then. I could have mastered the Avatar State and saved myself from having to go through the pain of mending a broken heart. It hurts to love, and after all this time I've finally discovered that it really isn't worth it." He closed his eyes.

"Aang, I'm so sorry," Katara said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I never meant to hurt you."

"I tried, Katara." He finally turned to face her and his shining gray eyes locked with hers. "I tried so hard to make you love me."

"There's nothing I can do about it. Once I got into my relationship with Zuko, I was trapped. I helped bring out the goodness in him; I helped him become the person he was before his father banished him, the person he was supposed to grow up to be. I was afraid if I broke up with him, he would fall back into his old insecurities and everything we had worked through would come back and he'd be back at square one. I couldn't leave him; he needed me." Katara's glossy blue eyes gazed hazily back into Aang's. "And now… now it's too late to go back. He proposed… and I've accepted."

This last pronouncement was the final straw for the Avatar; unable to restrain them any longer, Aang's eyes filled with tears and poured down his face. His small body shook with silent sobs as he continued to hold Katara's gaze.

"No Aang, don't… don't… don't cry," she soothed tenderly, wiping his cheeks with the thumb of her right hand.

This time, he didn't try to escape her touch and he allowed her to proceed with her futile attempt to stem the flow of his tears. The feel of her smooth fingers caressing his skin caused his insides to freeze; for once, her touch didn't bring the warmth and relief it usually brought.

"Katara, I just want you to know that as long as you're happy and content with your decision, I am too, because to me, nothing else matters, and that's all I've ever wanted – for you to be happy." His anger at Zuko for stealing Katara away from him had been gradually ebbing away and by this point had evaporated completely; he never could stay angry at her for long.

Katara heard the quiver in his voice and she enveloped him in a hug so he couldn't see her watering eyes. He trembled violently beneath her arms as he sobbed harder, her hug feeling more like the sharp sting of a scorpion bee than any hug he had experienced before, helping only to worsen the situation instead of improve it because her last hug was reminding him of what he could no longer have, of what he had lost.

He had lost. After all he had done for her, after all they had been through together, and after all the endeavors he had made in vain to make her fall for him the way he had fallen for her, he had lost. He should have known it would be hopeless the instant she told him she didn't love him in an amorous way, but, being the stubborn optimist he was, he had pressed her into feeling in a way she could never feel for him, inadvertently pushing her away and forcing her into a relationship she might not want to be in. He should have listened, he should have known better. He should have paid attention to the danger signs when they flared, but he didn't, and now he was paying the price as he realized one thing: If loving someone with all your heart came with the heavy price of the relentless, indescribable pain of a broken heart, it was better not to love than to love at all.

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I one of the main things I think about Zutara I tried to convey here - it's that I think Katara would be an Ursa replacement to Zuko. He still misses Ursa and Katara, being her motherly self, would try to heal his wounds. I don't think Zuko needs an Ursa replacement - he needs to work through his problems alone! And on a completely irrelevant note, I'm still suffering from AWS. When is season three coming??

Thank you for reading!


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